When you read as much as this reviewer, you will be used to the florid expansiveness of most back cover book blurbs which promise the earth, the moon and the stars, a word-driven trailer of sorts for the story which lies tantalisingly within.
Much of the time the blurbs mail the feel and rough outline of the story just so, evoking the same sense you get from a well-hewn trailer where promise and possibility is everywhere but spoilers are scant and the exact twists and turns of the novel within still lie waiting to be discovered.
But then you have book blurbs like the one Lights Out in Lincolnwood by Geoff Rodkey which, it needs to be stressed at the outset is a blindingly good novel that grips you from the word go and doesn’t let go for over 500 thrillingly well-told but emotionally nuanced pages, that were written you can only assume by the high school intern there doing work experience.
The blurb promises you a “funny and heart-warming” story “of one ordinary family and their unexpected adventure of a lifetime”, and while that is enticing when the actual narrative is about an apocalyptic event which seemingly ends civilisation as we know it, it bears very little relation to what actually happens in the book.
Still, we are here to review the book, not the amusingly distracting blurb, and again, it must be said that Lights Out in Lincolnwood is a book and a half that slowly but excitingly explores what might happen to one American suburb when the lights, and really anything and everything electronic, cease to function one otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning.
Then a woman at the front end of the car screamed in terror.
‘OHMYGO—!’
Other voices joined hers, but their cries were smothered in the roar of an explosion so thunderous that Dan felt it vibrate in his chest cavity.
The two-hundred-plus people in the car uttered a collective gasp of shock.
Then everybody began to move at once.
Much like Fear the Walking Dead which took its gloriously good, own sweet time showing how society unnervingly breaks down with frightening speed and ease when zombies suddenly lurch to “life” everywhere, Lights Out in Lincolnwood charts the slow and inexorable decay of the civilised order when all of the stalwarts and certainties of life suddenly cease to exist.
Instantly and completely.
No slow collapse, no lingering flicker or spark; nope, without any warning or indication of anything amiss mobile phones go black, trains stop on their tracks, cars move no further down busy commuter roads, and alarmingly, plans start dropping from the sky.
No one knows why, and honestly as Lights Out in Lincolnwood does its wholly engrossing human thing, you don’t really care – what matters is that the four somewhat estranged members of the Altman family, who have let life sculpt them into inadvertent benign warring factions, a clear case of tail wagging existential dog where no one is really happy but unable to stop and question by as the day-to-day barrels relentlessly on, are not even ready to cope with real life as it stands and certainly not if the world ends and all the old sureties, such as they perilously were, suddenly slide into inelegant, sudden oblivion.
(courtesy official author site)
Dan, fifty-something and ex-lawyer who’s now writing scripts for a pulpy police/vigilante show on broadcast TV, is not exactly handling his mid-life career change all that well while wife Jen is finding that her MBA isn’t much good when she can’t land a good job or be the mum she wants to be, with the only solution being becoming a closet alcoholic (which, pssst by the way, is all not all the closeted; yeah, sorry, Jen but people are noticing).
The kids are faring any better with Chloe a bundle of getting ready for college and tennis comp glory nerves and 14-year-old Max bullied, ostracised and more than a little addicted to vaping and tobacco.
That’s not exactly the picture of a family perfectly poised to spring into end of the world coping action and much of the beguiling readability, quite apart from its quietly searing commentary of people to pull the autocracy and violence within 48 hours of law and order goes arse-end-over, of Lights Out in Lincolnwood is watching how Rodkey masterfully manoeuvres them to the point where maybe, just maybe, they may have a way of making it through.
So, it’s not really warm-hearted or funny but as a dissection of a family under wholly unique and unusual stress who finally find they need each other more than they ever suspected – the removal of the distractions of day-to-day life and any lingering hope the end of electricity might be just be a blip work their slow but unifying magic over the course of an emotionally muscular narrative – Lights Out in Lincolnwood is brilliant and immersive in ways that make turning the pages a compulsive necessity and not just a readable want.
But the library door was locked, its interior dark and silent. Whatever knowledge it contained was as inaccessible to him as YouTube. So he just sat there, perched in front of the entrance, immobilized by an overwhelming sense of hopelessness.
He couldn’t even serve a volleyball overhand. How the hell was he going to survive the apocalypse?
One of the things you will love about Lights Out in Lincolnwood is how it dangles the idea that maybe this cessation of energy is just a momentary thing when it becomes ever more ominously clear that even if it is, humanity is going to turn on itself anyway.
The fact that the “surviving the Blitz” community chutzpah of the first 24 hours quickly turns into dystopian authoritarianism, gun-toting militias and supermarket looting just one day later, shows you, even if the lights do magically wink back on, just how close we are to societal collapse at any given moment.
Chilling? You better believe it and not just because things quickly break down to who has the biggest gun and the will to use it; no, the more alarming thing is that the monster of the piece is not the loss of power and all the slow-burning doom this entails, is humanity itself, and while this is a reasonably common theme in apocalyptic storytelling, there’s something about the way Rodkey slowly and ominously tells it that leaves you fearing for the worst down to your very marrow.
You will, of course, keep reading however because Lights Out in Lincolnwood is just that damn good; it takes the probable end of the world – the fact that no one can get any news just adds to the darkly foreboding end of hope that things will resume as they were – and infuses it with the kind of authentic humanity, good and bad, that reminds that end-of-the-world tales rise and fall on the strength of the humanity within, something Lights Out in Lincolnwood is not short of and which it used to devastatingly good storytelling effect.